Chapter 12: Hunting Wives
The rooftop solarium was a fishbowl of dying light. The sky bled orange and violet over the city’s skyline, the distant windows glittering like spilled circuitry. Up here, above everything, the only sound was the whisper of climate control and the soft brush of fingertips on paper.
Aura lay on her stomach on a deep plum chaise, her chin propped on her hands. Naked, the sunset painted her skin in molten gold, catching the curve of her spine, the swell of her hip. Jade reclined beside her, legs stretched out, her short blonde hair still damp from the shower. The silver collar was a permanent fact against her throat now. They hadn’t spoken of removing it. It looked right.
Between them, on a low glass table, sat a leather-bound notebook, its pages thick and blank. A fountain pen rested beside it, its nib a sharp, promising point.
“Claudia Winthrop,” Jade said, tracing a circle on her own knee. Her voice was low, thoughtful. “The charity ball maven. All those pearl strands and that brittle, perfect smile.” She picked up the pen, unscrewed the cap. The sound was precise. “Her husband is a cryptobro phantom. Never at the events. She’s holding that whole life up by sheer will. It’s a house of cards in a hurricane.”
Aura watched her write the name. The ink was a deep, bluish black. “What’s the crack?” she asked, her voice lazy. “The thing that would make it all fall down?”
Jade smiled, a thin, expert slice. “She has a driver. Sergei. Huge, quiet Ukranian guy. Been with her for years. She looks at him sometimes when she thinks no one’s watching. It’s not a social look.” She glanced at Aura. “It’s a hunger look. The kind that gets confused for gratitude until it doesn’t.”
Aura imagined it: the stiff-backed society queen, the silent giant in the front seat, the latent charge in a tinted-town car. She reached over and took the pen from Jade’s fingers. Their hands brushed. Jade let her have it.
Under “Claudia Winthrop,” Aura wrote: Driver. Sergei. The car. The hunger. Her handwriting was looping, sensual, a contrast to Jade’s sharp angles. She dotted the ‘i’ with a little circle. “We could get him alone first,” she mused. “Elias could… calibrate him. Then we send him back to her. Not with instructions. Just… different. Open.”
“Yes,” Jade breathed, her eyes bright. “She’d feel the difference immediately. She’d try to fix him, to put the wall back up. But the crack would be inside him now. She’d spend every car ride feeling it widen.” She took the pen back. “It would dismantle her in plain sight. At the gala, in the front row of the opera. Perfect.”
They fell into a rhythm. The city below them darkened, lights winking on. The solarium’s glass walls turned mirror-like, reflecting their naked, conspiratorial forms back at them.
“Marcus Thorne,” Aura said next, staring at the ceiling as if reading the name there. “The media guy. The one with the podcast about ‘cognitive dominance.’ Talks about neural plasticity, flow states. All that jargon.”
Jade snorted. “He’s a toothpick in a three-thousand-dollar suit. His entire brand is uncompromising mental fortitude.” She wrote the name. “What’s his secret?”
“He has a panic room,” Aura said softly. “Not for intruders. For himself. When the pressure gets too much. His assistant let it slip once, drunk at a after-party. He goes in there and… screams. For hours. Then he comes out, does another six podcasts.”
Jade looked at her, impressed. “That’s good. That’s very good.” She thought for a moment. “We don’t even need to get to him. We just need to take the room away. A leak to the right gossip columnist. ‘Marcus Thorne’s Fortress of Solitude.’ The headline writes itself. His audience would eat him alive. The illusion of control, shattered.”
Aura took the pen. She added below his name: The panic room. The screaming. Expose the sanctuary. The page was becoming a map of fragile egos.
They went on like that, trading insights, weaving a web of other people’s vulnerabilities. The wife of the tech CEO who was secretly funding her lover’s art gallery. The congresswoman with the surgically-perfect family and the hidden, ruinous gambling debt. Each entry was a knot they could pull, a world they could unravel.
It was intoxicating. More intoxicating than any performance Aura had given at The Gaze. This wasn’t just captivation; this was architecture. They were building a shared purpose out of other people’s fault lines.
Jade’s finger tapped a name she’d written earlier. “Rafael Vega. The restaurateur. His secret is the usual. Boys. Young, pretty, paid for. But he’s careful. Discrete.”
Aura shifted, rolling onto her side to face Jade. The silk beneath her was cool. “That’s not the crack. That’s just a vice. Everyone has one of those.”
“Then what is?” Jade challenged, her green eyes glinting in the twilight.
Aura remembered. A rainy night, a private booth at the back of Vega’s overpriced tapas place. He’d been arguing with his head chef, a fierce, older woman named Maria. Vega had been pompous, dismissive. Maria had stared him down, spat a phrase in rapid-fire Spanish, and walked out. The look on Vega’s face hadn’t been anger. It had been terror. The terror of someone who knows they’re nothing without the talent they’re abusing.
“He’s scared of his head chef,” Aura said. “Maria. She’s the real engine. He knows it. His vice is a distraction. His fear is the crack.”
Jade held her gaze. A slow smile spread on her lips. She reached out and pushed a strand of dark hair behind Aura’s ear. The gesture was surprisingly tender. “You see them,” she murmured. “Not the masks. The faces under the masks.”
Aura leaned into the touch for a second, then pulled back, a flutter in her chest. “We both do.”
The notebook was half-full now. A dossier of desires and dreads. Their own sweat, from the warmth of the solarium and the quiet thrill of the work, had left faint smudges on the paper.
Jade closed the book with a soft thud. She ran her hand over the leather cover. “He’s going to love this,” she said, but the earlier doubt from the study was gone. This was solid. This was a product.
“It’s not for him,” Aura heard herself say.
Jade looked up sharply. “What?”
“This.” Aura gestured to the book. “Thinking about what he’d love… that’s just another performance. Another way of waiting for his approval.” She sat up, drawing her knees to her chest. “This is for us. This is our language. Our game. He gave us the key. We’re building the house.”
Jade was silent for a long moment, studying Aura. The last of the sunset painted her face in stark relief, one side warm gold, the other cool blue shadow. “You’re right,” she finally said, her voice firm. “Fuck the silk robes. Fuck the themed tableaus. That’s just… decoration.” She picked up the notebook, hefting its weight. “This is power. Real power. Not stolen money. Inferred leverage.”
She stood, a naked, decisive silhouette against the now-black sky. The city’s grid stretched behind her. “He said emptiness has a purpose. It can be filled.” She looked down at Aura. “He filled us with him. Now we’re filling the emptiness with this.”
Aura stood too. They faced each other, the glass table between them, the book of ruins upon it. The air between them vibrated with a new understanding. They were no longer just two women sharing a master. They were partners in a quiet, terrible excavation.
Jade picked up the fountain pen one last time. She opened the book to a fresh page. At the top, she wrote a single word, the ink bold and dark: Protocols.
“We need rules,” Jade said, business-like. “Methodology. How we select, how we approach, how we…” she searched for the word.
“How we open the cracks,” Aura finished. She came around the table, standing close to Jade. She took the pen. Under Protocols, she wrote: 1. Identify the Core Hunger.
Jade leaned over her shoulder, her breath warm on Aura’s neck. “2. Locate the Point of Maximum Leverage.”
Aura wrote it. Her handwriting slanted into Jade’s, the two styles merging. “3. Apply Pressure Through Indirect Means.”
They continued, passing the pen back and forth, their voices overlapping in the quiet glass room. The list grew. Isolate the Subject. Introduce the Alternative. Each rule was a stone in a foundation. They were no longer dreaming of silk robes for Elias. They were drafting a blueprint for a empire of whispered secrets.
Finally, Jade took the pen. At the bottom of the page, she wrote one last line, slower, with deliberate care: For Us.
Aura looked at those two words. A declaration. A covenant. She met Jade’s eyes. In them, she saw no trace of the rival club owner, no trace of the kneeling supplicant. She saw a co-architect.
From below, the faint chime of the penthouse elevator sounded. A soft, musical ping that echoed up the stairwell to the solarium door.
They froze.
The sound of the main door opening, then closing. Footsteps, measured and familiar, crossing the marble floor below.
Elias was home.
Aura’s heart, so steady a moment before, gave a single, hard knock against her ribs. Jade’s hand instinctively went to the silver collar, not to remove it, but to touch it, like a lodestone.
They looked at each other. The notebook lay open between them, a damning, beautiful testament. Their rules. Their protocol.
The footsteps started up the stairs to the solarium.
Jade’s lips parted. A question hung there, unspoken: Do we hide it?
Aura shook her head, once, a tiny, firm movement. No.
She reached out and closed the leather cover. She didn’t hide it. She simply placed the notebook squarely in the center of the glass table. A presentation.
Then she knelt on the silk rug, facing the stairwell door. She heard the soft rustle of silk as Jade knelt beside her. Shoulder to shoulder. Waiting.
The door opened. Elias stood in the frame, backlit by the hallway light. He was still in his dark coat, carrying the chill of the evening city on his shoulders. His gaze swept over them: two naked women kneeling in the twilight before a glass table, a single book upon it.
His eyes lingered on the notebook. Then on their faces. He stepped inside, letting the door sigh shut behind him.
“I brought wine,” he said, his voice neutral. He held up a bottle. “But I see you’ve been busy.”
He placed the bottle on the table beside their notebook. Its weight made a soft, definitive clink against the glass. He didn’t open it. He shrugged off his coat, draping it over the back of a chair, his movements slow and considered. His eyes never left them.
“What have you built in my absence?” he asked. His tone was mild, genuinely curious.
Jade spoke first, her voice clear. “A system. For identifying vulnerabilities. For applying pressure.” She gestured to the book. “Protocols.”
Elias didn’t reach for it. He circled the table instead, coming to stand before them. He looked down, his shadow falling across their bowed heads and upturned faces. “A system. Impressive. You’ve moved from reaction to creation.” He crouched, bringing himself to their level. The scent of cold night air and his clean, sharp cologne washed over them. “Tell me the first protocol.”
“Identify the Core Hunger,” Aura said, her gaze locked on his.
“Good.” A faint smile touched his lips. “A fundamental truth. Everyone has one. A deep, driving want.” He reached out and took Aura’s chin between his thumb and forefinger, tilting her face slightly. “Yours used to be the spotlight. The adoration of the crowd. A hunger for eyes.” He released her and turned the same grasp on Jade. “Yours was control. Dominion. A hunger for levers.”
He let go and stood, looking at the both of them. “And now? Now you sit together, having identified a new, shared hunger. The hunger to dismantle. To play god with other people’s fault lines.” He nodded slowly, approvingly. “This is progress. A more focused, more potent appetite.”
He began to pace, a slow circuit around their kneeling forms. “But hunger is a crude engine. It consumes. It burns. It leaves ash.” He stopped behind Jade, his hands resting lightly on her bare shoulders. She shivered under his touch. “What you’ve documented here,” he said, his voice dropping, intimate, “is the hunger of others. A catalogue of voids. Emptiness calling to emptiness.”
His hands moved to Aura’s shoulders, then back to Jade’s. “You wish to fill yourselves with the act of manipulating those voids. To feel powerful by witnessing collapse.” He leaned down, his mouth near Jade’s ear. “It’s a shallow filling. A temporary one. The power you feel is a phantom. It belongs to the situation, not to you.”
He straightened. “I can show you a deeper well. A simpler, purer focus. A hunger that, when fed, doesn’t leave you empty. It makes you whole.”
Aura felt a flush spread across her skin, a sudden, liquid warmth between her legs. She knew this tone. It was the precursor to a lesson. Jade’s breathing had shallowed beside her.
“What focus?” Jade asked, her voice barely a whisper.
Elias walked around to face them again. He unfastened his trousers. “This.”
He freed himself, already half-hard. In the dim solarium light, he looked both utterly ordinary and like the only thing that mattered. “All your scheming, your beautiful, wicked notebook… it’s just noise. A complex dance to avoid the simple, screaming truth.” He took himself in hand. “The core hunger isn’t for power over others. It’s for surrender to this. To the one thing that simplifies every equation, that ends every thought.”
Aura’s mouth watered. She couldn’t look away.
“You think about socialites and drivers, panic rooms and debts.” He gave himself a slow, languid stroke. “Your minds spin elaborate webs. But your bodies… your bodies are much wiser. They just crave this. The taste. The weight. The feeling of being used by it. Of having all those complicated thoughts fucked right out of you.”
Jade made a small, choked sound. Aura saw her hands were clenched into fists on her thighs, knuckles white.
“Admit it,” Elias said, his voice a soft command. “When you were writing your little rules, part of you was waiting for me to come home. Not to see your work. Not for praise. But for this. For the moment your real purpose walked through the door.”
He was fully hard now. He stepped closer, the tip brushing Aura’s lips, then Jade’s cheek. “This is your protocol. The only one that matters. Your mouths watering is the first rule. Your minds going quiet is the second.”
Aura leaned forward, instinctively, but he pulled back.
“Not yet,” he chided softly. “First, you need to understand. To retrain your perception.” He tucked himself back into his trousers, leaving them aching. “You’ve been taught that desire is complex. A maze of psychology and strategy. You’ve been taught to be ashamed of simple, base hungers.” He picked up the remote for the solarium’s sound system. “There’s an entire library of human joy dedicated to the celebration of this.”
He navigated to a streaming service, then to a section neither woman ever visited. The thumbnails were explicit, graphic. “Pornography,” Elias stated, as if announcing a university course. “You’ve been told it’s degrading. Exploitative. A guilty pleasure.” He selected a video at random—a scene of a woman enthusiastically servicing a man. He turned the volume up, not blaring, but clear. The wet, gagging sounds filled the quiet glass room.
“Look at her,” Elias said, pointing at the screen. “Look at his face. That’s not degradation. That’s devotion. That’s a woman freed from the burden of pretending she doesn’t want exactly what she wants. She’s not thinking about his stock portfolio or her career ambitions. She’s thinking about the stretch of her throat, the salt on her tongue, the complete and total occupancy of her attention.”
Aura stared. She had always held a vague disdain for porn. It seemed crude, a cartoon of real intimacy. But now, watching, listening with Elias’s commentary in her ear… she saw it differently. The woman’s eyes were glazed with pleasure. The man’s hands in her hair weren’t violent; they were guiding, grateful. It was a transaction of pure, delighted hunger.
“Oh,” Jade breathed out. She was staring too, her lips parted. “It’s… she really loves it.”
“She’s gorging on it,” Elias corrected, sitting on the chaise longue, making himself comfortable. “She’s in a state of pure, animal celebration. No guilt. No complicated backstory. Just cock. Worship. Bliss.” He gestured to the space on the rug before him. “Kneel here. Watch. Learn.”
They shuffled forward on their knees, their eyes glued to the screen. The scene changed to a different angle, more intense. Aura felt herself getting wetter. Jade’s breath was coming faster beside her.
“Your old ideas were a cage,” Elias murmured, his hand stroking Aura’s hair, then Jade’s. “You thought you were above this. You thought your cravings needed to be dressed up in plots and power dynamics.” On screen, the woman convulsed in orgasm, her sounds raw and uncontrolled. “That’s real. That’s freedom. The freedom to be a simple, craving creature. To let your entire world narrow to a single point of focus.”
He undid his trousers again. He was fully erect. “This is your world now. Your politics. Your art. Your religion.” He presented himself to them. “You will crave it when you wake. You will dream of it when you sleep. Your conversations will circle back to its taste, its feel, its effect on you. Your clever little notebook will gather dust.”
Aura didn’t hesitate. She leaned in and took him into her mouth, a deep, accepting swallow. The taste was familiar, anchoring. Jade was right there, her lips finding the shaft, her tongue tracing a vein. There was no competition now, only shared, desperate focus.
Elias sighed, his head tipping back against the velvet. “Good girls. See? No thought. Just need. Just service.”
He let them work, their movements becoming synchronized, a practiced rhythm. He watched the porn on the screen, then looked down at the two women devoted to him. “This is all the education you require,” he said, his voice thick. “Learning how to gorge. How to make your own pleasure inseparable from your devotion to this.”
He tangled his hands in their hair, guiding their pace. “You’re going to watch it for hours. You’re going to study it. You’re going to see a thousand different women finding their freedom on their knees, and you’re going to understand that they’ve found the one true thing. And you will, too.”
Aura felt her own orgasm building, a stupid, easy rise triggered by nothing but the motion of her mouth, the sounds from the screen, the weight on her tongue, and his words in her ears. It was embarrassingly simple. It was utterly profound.
“Come for me,” Elias whispered, not a request, a simple prediction of fact.
And she did. A sharp, unspeakable crest that shattered through her, making her moan around him, her body shuddering. A second later, Jade whimpered, her own hips jerking against empty air, a slick wetness spreading on the rug beneath her knees.
Elias didn’t stop them. He let their spasms subside, their mouths never leaving him. “See?” he said, his voice a satisfied rumble. “No plots. No protocols. Just truth. Just a craving, fed.”
On the large screen, the scene changed again. A new video began to play.